SATURDAY SENTINEL: Posing to remain on a bench at GSW

On of the biggest stories heading into any season is when a new coach takes over a team in the area. There have been quite a few changes from last spring that we have reported on to this point. Here in Morris, Keith Anderson is taking over for Luke Windy as the boys tennis coach and the soccer team is now being coached by Kristen Porter after Jeff Hunt moved on.

Just like those two vacancies, two others in the area were up for grabs at the end of last spring. Jon Posing stepped down as the head baseball coach at Gardner-South Wilmington, and then speculation began that he would take the head softball job when Michelle Lardi vacated that position. That is until Posing declined the job for the chance to "be a dad and watch" his daughter Lexi play softball.

Well, that didn't last very long, as Posing got the itch to coach Lexi while helping Wiers Academy coach over the summer. Just like that, Posing was back in the mix, and though his appointment by the GSW board was not unanimous, he did have a spring coaching gig again for the Panthers. You can get the full rundown of the story on Tuesday in the MDH. In the meantime, here's the clip notes and a couple of unused snippets.

Jon has been a coach for eight years in the area, and anytime someone sticks around that long, we kind of get to know them fairly well here at the MDH. Just about everything Posing told me I used for the story that will run next week, except a non-sequitor that involved being at Gardner-South Wilmington High School in general.

"I love it. In the situation I was in (eight years ago), I had time to think about it," Posing said. "I had graduated college in 1990 and I was at Lombardi Chevrolet at the time and I really didn't feel ready to start looking. Then one day a (GSW) board member called me and said that they had a position that they thought would be a perfect fit for me and it was right up my alley."

That alley included a job as a PE teacher and baseball coach for the past eight seasons. Now he's got the chance to coach softball — and Lexi at least for the next three seasons until she graduates.

"I really didn't want to miss her," Posing told me. "I got to see her play three games last spring. But I guess you could say that now I'm going to have a pretty good view of all her games."